Terror grips Uganda after Amin

In part six of our continuing series on the fall of Idi Amin’s military government, Timothy Kalyegira writes about the terror that gripped Uganda shortly before and after the April 11, 1979 coup: -

On March 23, 1979, less than three weeks to the end of Amin’s government, a resident of Kampala called Daniel Kyahulwa Kakonge simply disappeared never to be seen again.

It was assumed that this was the work of the dreaded State Research Bureau, intent on wreaking havoc on innocent Ugandans one last time before their tyrannical government fell from power.

On March 26, 1979, a man called Benjamin Henry Emor was murdered in Kampala. This reinforced the desperate wish by thousands of Ugandans for the Tanzanians to quickly step in and end Idi Amin’s reign of terror.

On the very day Amin’s government collapsed, April 11, 1979, Noah Lameck Masiira Sempiira, former General Manager of the National Trust (the agency that completed Uganda House in Kampala in 1973), was shot dead right outside the Uganda Commercial Bank headquarters building.

Since this was during the war, with Tanzanian troops surrounding Kampala, it was assumed that it was one of the unfortunate instances of “collateral damage”, the inevitable civilian deaths during combat.

A week later, April 18, 1979, an employee of the Uganda Electricity Board (known today as Umeme), John Mary Muzeyi Kalema, was shot dead by unknown people in Kampala. On June 1, 1979, a prominent Kampala bank manager called Tony Gonza Bagonza was shot dead in the city.

On June 3, 1979, Mary Nalumu Sembuya, a senior nurse at Mulago Hospital and wife of businessman Christopher Sembuya (of Sembule Steel Mills), was shot dead at their home at No. 32 Windsor Crescent in Kololo, a Kampala suburb.

The assailants stole the Sembuya’s car, a Fiat number UUQ 820. With the government of President Lule in office for only five weeks, on June 1, 1979, a building at plot 48 Kampala Road that housed the Uganda Ey’eddembe Publications was set on fire.

Once again, the assumption was that this must be the work of the only known evil people in Uganda since 1971: soldiers of ex-president Amin’s Uganda Army or the State Research Bureau intelligence agency.

“Ousted Idi Amin’s bandits are held responsible for the fire which broke out in buildings in Kampala on Friday,” is the way the government-owned newspaper, the Uganda Times reported the incident on Monday June 4, 1979.

However, some people were starting to note a pattern that left them unconvinced that this was the sabotage by Amin’s men.

A former exiled opponent of Amin’s regime, expert in criminology and forensic evidence, Andrew Lutakome Kayiira – who was now the deputy Minister of Internal Affairs in the UNLF government – called and told a press conference in Kampala that the building on Kampala Road had been set on fire by explosives.

Kayiira said this was only the latest in “a number of incidents in the past which have brought about a sense of insecurity in the country,” reported the Uganda Times on June 5.

“He [Kayiira] said there are more reports of people dressed in military uniforms commandeering vehicles whose owners are either killed or left stranded in remote areas of Kampala.”
These military uniforms that Kayiira referred to were of the UNLA, not Amin’s Uganda Army.